Mystery History – Perry Hill Bike Trails

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Waterbury is a town that is nearly as old as our country and is filled with oddities and mysteries. I have lived in Vermont my whole life and have always liked wandering through the woods and seeing what I can stumble upon.

Seniors Cole Spaulding, David Deschamps, and I have all lived here for our whole lives and have decided to explore and look for the hidden parts of our town and share the places that we have already discovered.

The first mysterious hidden place I found was a small graveyard in the woods on Perry Hill; it is a graveyard for the old mental asylum that was in Waterbury. I found it while sledding through the woods with a couple of my friends some years ago. It consists of a headstone about two feet tall, a foot wide, and half a foot thick and has an inscription detailing the staff and patients that died and were buried near that spot. The headstone is located on a small knoll that overlooked the Winooski River when the forest was farmland but it has since become overgrown and now sits at the base of tall pine trees.

This is the memorial marker that is dedicated to the twenty hospital staff and patients that were buried on this ground between 1891 and 1912.

The memorial is marked by a headstone with a plaque on it and the burial plot is marked with four small marble squares forming a rectangle around the headstone. The memorial was placed in 1991; not much is known about the people that are buried here except that they were patients and staff members that tended to the farm on Perry Hill. The state hospital was built in 1890 and according to the grave the first person to be buried here was buried one year after the hospital was opened.

1 Comment

One Response to “Mystery History – Perry Hill Bike Trails”

Reed McCracken on
March 9th, 2017 11:15 am

Interesting piece Riley! I’ve heard about this and always wondered what this cemetary looks like. Is this pretty close to the top of the big first hill? And on the right?

It sounds like there are no grave markers?

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